OneShot: Knees Bent, Arms Spaghetti
by Vainglory 2KW8O
Summary: Niko is just an ordinary Nekomata but, when he's abducted and taken to a parallel universe by an evil bitcoin miner with delusions of godhood, Niko has no choice but to be his messiah and embark on a harrowing adventure fraught with wacky hijinks to change a light bulb.
1. Chapter 1

Oneshot: Knees Bent, Arms Spaghetti

Hi there! I'm Vainglory 2KW8Ω! You may remember me as the author of such celebrated literary masterpieces as "Avatar: The Book of Screaming Vengeance", "Resident Evil 7: Biohazard 2: Resident Evil 8: Superhazard", and "Look What's REALLY Happened to Rosemary's Baby!" and I'm here to talk to you about bit coin mining.

A lot of people assume that mining for bit coins involves propping up a bunch of computers to run at the same time and magically create this infamous cryptocurrency as though this stuff grows on trees and is just being picked at an arbitrarily slow rate for no real good reason.

Believe me, you would be surprised to learn how much of a resemblance bit coin mining bears to actual mining. Just like with mining for real coal or diamonds: you need a prospector to find a suitable site for the extraction of bit coin, surveyors to mark the boundaries of your mine, and a labor force to extract the material itself. I, of all people, should know all of this because I am to bit coin as De Beers is to Diamonds and I have my own personal South Africa for the harvesting of bit coin.

The denizens of my South Africa, that is, my bit coin mines, work for 16 hours a day, go home to languish in insomnia for 6 hours, get a 2 hour power nap in, wake up to smell the acidic black coffee I provide for them like Quail and Manna for the wandering Israelites, and they get back to work to start the cycle all over again. They do not turn against me because these stupid, primitive savages worship me as though I were a god and they gather my bit coin as a tribute to me in exchange for an empty promise of my favor, often just a fake expression of my love. But it's not enough that they should worship me lest they should gather together and rise up against me like a mob of angry villagers from a Frankenstein movie and climb my spire to defenestrate me as if I was Jezebel because they need light to pluck the fruits of their labor as well as Ultraviolet radiation to prevent Rickets so they need to give their unquestioning and absolute fealty and obedience to me or else things will get dark and ugly for them like Ving Rhames chasing them through a back alley in Baltimore.

Of course, I provide that light; It's deducted from their wages just like Social Security, but I provide it nevertheless. I have a specially-designed light bulb in my spire, a monolithic structure that's taller than Trump Tower in New York City and serves better steaks in the restaurant on the 47th floor. It shines its nurturing, guiding light of inspiration onto its populace, who are so awe-struck by it that they prostrate themselves on the ground and do this sort of grovel-gallop as though it were the Holy Kaaba of Mecca.

To them, this is their sun. And, just like our sun, it will not last forever. Even now, our sun is in the autumn of its life and its bones (or, in this case, its cauldron of super-heated hydrogen molecules) are growing weary. Someday, maybe not tomorrow or even a year from now but probably more like a hundred, we will have to build some tough-as-all-fuck bomb shelters to shield ourselves from the coming supernova and cross our fingers that it becomes a neutron star rather than a black hole and hope even further that the crops can photosynthesize with it just as well as they could with a regular star lest they should either wither away or become carnivorous and turn on mankind as retribution for thousands of years of systematic, institutionalized slavery.

Unlike our sun, however, the sun of my world did not have the excuse of having to take on a lot of work, what with fostering countless epochs worth of crustaceans, dinosaurs, and mammals to be good stewards of the planet that took an entire supereon to get right and whatnot, so it does not deserve to be given any leniency for shorting out about a year after I got it screwed in. I was told that that thing was guaranteed to last 10 years and was custom fitted and designed by skilled artisans who had doctorates in nuclear engineering and shit and got paid assloads of money by Megaman (a/n: not **that** Megaman, you dumbasses, the light bulb company based in Germany) to make the best light bulbs on the market. A lot of good that did me. But the worst part was that they were unable to make another bulb with the same specifications because the blueprints got irreparably soaked by some ignorant klutz tripping on his own shoelaces and spilling coffee wherever the hell he damn well pleased while all of the designers who worked on the bulb retired or got spirited away by headhunters who promised them jobs with bigger salaries at General Electric but got sold on the Akodessewa Fetish Market for their troubles.

Needless to say, the locals who depended on me to provide their sun got desperate and sought my guidance...

"Oh, Lord Jesús Martíne," A rather fruity man by the name of Rachis Something-or-Other (I forgot what his last name was so I'mma say it was Canseco) who was wearing a bright teal Quetzalcoatl costume bellowed, "we beseech thee to answer our prayers!"

He was trying to call me by my real name but it's actually "Jesús Martínez." I suppose that little 'zed' at the end was one too many letters for a feeble mind such as his to keep track of. The only reference these savages had to my identity was my Microsoft account and Rachis kept forgetting that I prefered to be called Vainglory 2KW8Ω or just Vainglory for short (and yes, I am always pissed off that won't allow you to put Greek letters in your handle).

He was talking into a Blue Yeti mic hooked up to a General Electric TAJ-19, an antique WWII-era transmitter the size of a goddamn Coke machine; a massive hulk of obsolete military hardware that was imposing enough for my peons to fashion into an altar dedicated to yours truly, complete with war paint, skulls, bones, and refrigerator drawings. By the way, Rachis' kids drew those pictures as tributes to me. They also made the skulls and bones with play-doh; how adorable. I just wish they would use the Crayola washable paint I got for them rather than THE FUCKING PRIMER! THOSE LITTLE SHITS!

But, anyway, I bought this machine at the Indiana Flea Market and I gave it to the workers as the only means by which to talk to me. I taught ol' Se **ñ** or Canseco how to operate it and I also bought some USB adapters for it so it would be compatible with that previously mentioned Blue Yeti mic and a set of Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones. The difficulty in starting up this machine pretty much gave him the exclusive privilege to have an audience with me and the really great thing about this guy was that he was slavishly devoted to me so I made him the high priest of my cult and everybody believes everything he says. His congregation stood by, an uncouth crowd of backwards-ass mutants and robots cloaked in hooded robes, waiting for their priest to give them my answer.

"Lord Jesús Martíne! I beseech thee once more," this cocksucker was really getting on my nerves because I was trying to enjoy a bag of beer-flavored kettle chips while watching Gilmore Girls episodes that I got off of PirateBay before it became an FBI honeypot, "Please, answer our prayers for this is our most desperate Hour of Darkness."

I decided to humor him. I got on my Uniden Bearcat 980 CB radio, set the frequency to 47.3358 MHz, and prepared my best James Earl Jones impression, "VAINGLORY SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONE!" I spoke in an intimidating baritone, "WHY DO YOU INSIST ON DISTURBING ME!"

"I'm very sorry, my Lord," Rachis Canseco prostrated himself before my altar, "But the workers have raised their concerns about the inadequate light in this world."

"WHAT IS THINE BIG DEAL?" I asked, "ARE THEY NOT PROVIDED WITH ENOUGH LIGHT FROM THE PHOSPHOR SHRIMP?"

"I'm afraid to inform you that the phosphor shrimp have been less than ideal for their work." Rachis nervously shifted his weight, worried about getting on my bad side if he did not exercise due caution in talking to me, "You see, the light from the phosphor shrimp does not provide UV radiation and there have been sharp increases in the rates of suicide and Rickets cases because of this. Not only that, but the phosphor shrimp are our only source of sustenance and they don't reproduce fast enough to outpace our hunger."

"SO YOU'RE TELLING ME THAT YOU'RE GOING TO RUN OUT OF LIGHT, HUH?"

"Precisely."

"SO HOW, PRAY TELL, IS THAT SUPPOSED TO AFFECT ME?"

"Well, you see, have you not noticed that the Spire has stopped rotating?"

"NOW THAT THOU MENTIONETH IT: YEAH, IT IS MOST PECULIAR."

"That Spire acts as a gyroscope for our world. If it does not spin: it could mean catastrophe. The earth will break apart and swallow us whole into oblivion."

What he was essentially saying was that my bit coin rig was going to crap out on me and I would lose a shitload of money if I didn't get that light bulb fixed.

"VERY WELL," I said, "I SHALL BRING YOU SALVATION FROM YOUR WOES," I gave a moment's pause as something delightfully fiendish popped into my head, "IN THE MEANTIME, YOU MUST PERFORM A TASK FOR ME."

"And, what would that be, my Lord?" Rachis seemed to be ill-at-ease. Sometimes, you can get a bad feeling that somebody else is getting a bad feeling; my theory as to how that's possible is that every lifeform on Earth emits an electrical field and subtle changes in one's voltage or ohm level can be subconsciously detected by some people, almost like telepathy. Alternatively, I could be an empath.

"OH, NOT MUCH," I said, "I'M ONLY BESTOWING UPON YOU THE GREATEST OF RESPONSIBILITIES A MAN SUCH AS YOURSELF COULD POSSIBLY ASK FOR. TO SHIRK THIS WOULD BE TO ENSURE UTTER RUIN FOR YOUR WORLD."

Rachis' bad feeling seemed to subside, "Please, tell me! I live to serve you and to fail you would bring me great sorrow, my Lord!"

Now, that was the kind of attitude I liked in a man, "AT THE SIXTH HOUR OF EVERY MORNING, YOU MUST BRING ONE CHILD, MALE OR FEMALE, TO THIS ALTAR AND THRUST A DAGGER INTO HIS BOWELS AND DRAW THE INCISION JUST SHORT OF HIS RIBS. THEN, YOU MUST PUNCTURE HIS LEFT LUNG AND THE BREATH OF LIFE SHALL ESCAPE FROM HIS RIGHT LUNG AND ASCEND TO THE HEAVENS AND PRECIPITATE AS NOURISHING RAIN FOR YOUR CROPS."

"My Lord, to ask this of me is too much to bear! Surely, my soul would be forsaken!"

"YOU DARE QUESTION MY COMMANDS, MORTAL! WAS IT SOMEONE ELSE WHO SAID THAT TO FAIL ME WOULD BRING HIM GREAT SORROW? YEA, AND GREAT SORROW SHALL BEFALL HIM! BEHOLD, I BRING YOUR SISTER HERE!"

I used my godly powers to teleport his sister, a prophetess dressed like a Brazilian Samba dancer whose name escapes me, even though I ought to know because she was really cute, so I'll just say her name was Tiffy, next to Rachis. He threw his headphones off and started screaming like a bitch. I levitated Tiffy into the air and Rachis made a feeble attempt to jump up and snatch her by the ankles but that resulted in a face plant that knocked out one of his teeth. It was hilarious. The congregation that had gathered knew what would come next and they were compelled to stare at it. The parents learned long ago that they were obligated to hold their children above their heads to witness my miracles and the children, in turn, learned to stay still and keep quiet as they looked on. My raucous laughter went uninterrupted until I noticed Tiffy's hysterical crying and incoherent babbling as she was tumbling around like a hamster in a ball. I struck her with a thunderbolt and her terror reached a crescendo with a shriek that must have ripped her vocal cords apart like a frenzy of microscopic sharks rubbing up against them and leaving behind a million tiny paper cuts with their denticles before her body erupted in an explosion of chum and feathers like a can of unopened Van Camp's pork and beans cooking over an open fire for too long. It was arousing.

Rachis fell to his knees, covered in his sister's guts, and wept. I watched as he picked up one of her feathers and sniffed it like a line of coke on a pair of unwashed panties before he stuffed it in his pocket.

I got on my Bearcat and beckoned him to put his headphones back on. He lurched over to them, like William H. Macy in Fargo traipsing to his car to scrape the ice off of his windshield, and rested them on his head.

"DO YOU KNOW NOW TO, NEVER AGAIN, DEFYETH ME!"

"Yes, Lord Vainglory. Never again shall I question you."

"GOOD. DO AS I HAVE COMMANDED YE AND USE THIS WHEN YOU DO IT," I conjured a wavy dagger and sent it down to him from the heavens. Rachis grabbed the dagger and ran one of his fingers along the blade as though he were taking it for a ride on a roller coaster of despair. "AND YOU WILL DO IT," I smirked, "OR ELSE, YOUR CHILDREN WILL SUFFER A SIMILAR FATE."

"I understand, Lord Vainglory."

"GOOD. MAKE CERTAIN THAT EVERY SOUL WAKES UP TO WITNESS THE SACRIFICES. THE MEN AND THE WOMEN. THE LIVING AND THE ROBOTIC. THE ELDERLY AND THE LITTLE CHILDREN. BE SURE TO MAKE THEM ALL SEE IT."

"My Master, not to question your wisdom but…" he gulped, "might we make an exception for women with small children?"

"NOW, WHY THE HELL WOULD WE DO THAT?"

"To see a child being murdered would do grievous harm to a little one's heart. It would just be too much for him to bear for the rest of his life."

"OHOHOHO, RACHIS, BUDDY! YOU'RE NOT SAYING THAT YOU'RE CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR INNOCENCE, ARE YOU? IT CAN TRAUMATIZE THEM, SURE, BUT THAT'S A GOOD THING; THE WORLD IS A TERRIBLE PLACE AND CHILDREN NEED TO BE EXPOSED TO THESE SORTS OF EXPERIENCES TO BUILD A TOLERANCE FOR THE STRESSES OF LIFE. IF WE WERE TO MOLLYCODDLE OUR CHILDREN AND CONSTANTLY HOVER OVER THEIR SHOULDERS, READY TO SHIELD THEM FROM THE SLIGHTEST THREAT OF DANGER: THEY WOULD GROW UP TO BE SHALLOW AND MANIC. SEEING THE BLOOD SACRIFICE OF A CHILD WILL GIVE THEM THE OPPORTUNITY FOR A REAL EXPERIENCE IN GROWING UP AND MAKE THEM MORE THOUGHTFUL AND INTELLIGENT; I KNOW IT DID WONDERS FOR ME WHEN I WAS BEING RAISED IN A COMMUNE THAT BELONGED TO A RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION THAT I AM LEGALLY PRECLUDED FROM IDENTIFYING BY NAME."

Rachis said nothing. His face was frozen in a look of utter amazement.

I figured he must have been confused, "LET ME PUT IT THIS WAY: INNOCENCE IS LIKE A HYMEN: THE SOONER IT'S OFF, THE BETTER."

"I see," Rachis said, "I will do as you command, my Lord."

"EXCELLENT! JUST ADHERE TO YOUR SACRED DUTY AND I SHALL BRING TO YOU A MESSIAH. HE WILL BRING YOU SALVATION AND LIGHT THE SKY ONCE MORE!"

I turned off my Bearcat and opened a window in Tor so I could torrent some discographies in FLAC format without seeding…

In the weeks that followed, I sporadically searched through some parallel universes with an Inter-Universal Warper/Ripper that I bought off of Ebay (it cost an assload) to find the perfect candidate to be my messiah but, for the most part, I procrastinated and vegged out watching videos of snow leopards and cheetahs meowing like house cats. However, I did get around to opening a rift to another universe where the light bulb that I needed could be bought off of Ebay and I managed to snipe two auctions for them and one more auction for the blueprints so I would never have to worry about running out of light bulbs again.

While my search for the Messiah continued, Rachis did as I commanded and brought a child to his altar to plunge the wavy dagger I gave him into the kidneys and then drag the blade towards the heart and punctured the left lung as he chanted his uvulations. His congregation was deathly silent as he performed his ritual. In retrospect, I probably should have told them that they needed to sing hymns while he did it. I'm not inclined to write those, especially not in praise of myself because I'm a pretty modest guy, but I would have trusted Rachis to come up with a good one.

A few weeks into the search, I still had no luck finding the Messiah but I did find a program that would allow me to materialize myself as a physical presence in my virtual bit coin mine, sort of like in the Matrix except I could completely digitize my real world physical self into the virtual mine and that would allow me to materialize in any real world safehouses after I made that killing in the bit coin market and set up a private cloud that could be covertly maintained by dozens of servers that it would piggyback from, like the ones at Bank of America's headquarters or the CIA's (they wouldn't notice because they're a bunch of retards who hire Indian script kiddies who can't solve the simplest and most common software bugs without googling them), so it would never really go away or be extinguished unless humanity destroyed itself with a global nuclear war. The only catch to it was that it needed a lot of power to sustain my virtual presence and that meant getting the spire to work again.

After a couple of months, however, I found my perfect messiah in a parallel universe where a race of hideous freaks of nature which looked like a cross between cats and people, called the Nekomata, were the dominant race on their version of Mars rather than Earth as their planetary system was almost identical to ours and the Nekomata lived on the fourth planet from the sun while the second and third ones were desolate, acidic hellholes.

His name was Niko, and he was being tucked into bed by what I assumed was his legal guardian. It was easy to assume she was his mother, she resembled him in a lot of ways except she was taller and had a nice pair of big ol' titties and a wide set of hips. Her face was quite nice to look at too, she didn't look haggard or mean but quite happy and charitable. However, when you're dealing with extra-dimensional creatures: it's prudent not to go with your initial impressions.

The boy who would screw in my light bulb wasn't bad to look at, either. He was young, cute, vulnerable… Just the way I liked them. I wished at that moment that I could have been the one tucking him into bed instead of his guardian.

That's why I abducted him from his home. I did him a favor, really. He was being raised by a single woman and would probably have grown up to be a lowlife without a strong father figure like myself in his life.

I teleported him into a new house I had constructed for him. The contractors who built it all died because a quarter of them were handling rusty nails and I refused to pay for their tetanus shots and the rest of them died because they were working in the dead of winter and would frequently slip on thick sheets of ice and proceed to fall from the second story, eviscerate themselves with their power tools, lose control of their own telescopic handlers and impale their fellow workmen, or they would go over to the nearby hydrogen sulfide geysers for a smoke break and light themselves on fire.

For a time, this house was haunted by the vengeful ghosts of the construction workers who had their lives snuffed out by my negligence but I exorcised them to a dimension of eternal suffering exactly like the one in Event Horizon so Niko would not be molested by any spirits. Just by me.

I placed him in the bedroom and made sure to lock the door in case he woke up too soon. Rachis' job was obsolete and I was about to lay him off, eternally and irrevocably, lest he were to pose a threat to me.

I got on my Bearcat and called his transmitter. When he heard its tone beckon him to the altar, he wasted no time in scrambling for the mic, "What news do you bring for us, my Lord?"

"Your peoples' salvation is nigh," my reassuring tones deceived him into betraying a smile. "However, I regret to inform you that your services are no longer required."

His smile turned to a look of confusion, "What?"

"I SAID YOUR SERVICES ARE NO LONGER REQUIRED!"

"Forgive me, my Lord, I heard what you have said. I just can't say that I understand why you seek to rid of my services. Have I not been loyal to you?"

"To a fault, Rachis, Dearest of Friends. However, since we already have a Messiah, your role as High Priest is effectively redundant. I have also discovered a means by which I can manifest myself in your world as a physical presence so, with me around, it will be especially apparent that your function is vestigial."

"Then I shall devote my life to being a good father to my children and seek to atone for the children I have sacrificed in your name for they have brought no rain."

"I lied to you. They weren't meant to bring rain. I just hate children. The only redeeming thing about them is that they make me horny when they get a knife stuck into them like the way you did it," My heart fluttered to see Rachis tense up, grind his teeth, and let tears stream down his face like the pussy he was, "And now, you see, that I have told you too much so, not only are you vestigial, but you're a liability as well. That's why I'm going kill you."

Rachis "You're a monster, Jesús!"

"HAHAHAHA! THAT'S RIGHT, BABY! BETTER TELL YOUR KIDS TO CHECK UNDER THEIR BEDS FOR ME, TONIGHT!"

"I curse you, demon! May your Messiah turn against you and run you through with his sword!"

"WHO ARE YOU TO CURSE YOUR GOD, PUNY MORTAL! MY WORD IS INCONTROVERTIBLE AND MY WILL IS JUST. FOR YOUR INSOLENCE, I SHALL SUMMON YOUR CHILDREN TO WATCH AS I SMITE YOU!"

And so, I used my godly powers to bring his children to the altar and watch as I hurled a thunderbolt at his sorry ass and made him convulse into a delightfully gruesome jig until his limbs popped off of his torso, his head exploded like a bomb, his eyes and teeth flew through the air like shrapnel, and blood sprayed like fountains from the empty sockets in an orgiastic climax of carnage.

His children's horror was my delight. They wailed. I laughed.

"¡AHAHAHA! ¡PARA CITAR AL GRAN GUSTAVO CERATI: NADA PERSONAL, NIÑOS!"

Rachis' body erupted in an orgasmic cherry pop like Bill Murray's zit in Osmosis Jones and his guts sprayed all over his hysterically screaming children. After I sodomized them with a couple of titanium poles that I greased with their father's own blood, fat, and insulin and rubbed one out to it: I teleported them to their bedroom and watched as they mustered the feeble strength to pull the rods out of each other's gaping assholes and apply rubbing alcohol to their bleeding rectums so they wouldn't get infected before going to bed to have fitful, restless slumbers that I exacerbated with my godlike power of dream manipulation. They had been so traumatized by my treatment of them that Alulu, the little girl, reverted to an infantile state while Calamus, her older brother, suppressed his memory of these incidents and became a nervous wreck. Of course, if they were my kids, they wouldn't be such sheltered little pansies and wouldn't freak out like that if I did that to them because they wouldn't have the misfortune of being sired by a pathetic loser like Rachis Canseco.

Satisfied with how I tied those loose ends, I turned my attention to Niko, who was just stirring himself out of his sleep…

I shall continue this story soon but, right now, I'm feeling a bit light-headed so I'll need to take a power nap for a few hours or days or whatever. Please stand by.


	2. Chapter 2

As though a fire alarm was crying incessantly to have its batteries changed, Niko's eyes jolted open. For a split second, I saw a bright yellow flash escape from them . Just like a cat, they glowed in the dark and that meant that they were highly sensitive to light. The implications of this made me giddy with the prospect of truly artful applications of creative sadism.

"H-hello?" his voice was meek. Perhaps he was caught in the grip of sleep paralysis and spoke softly so as not to arouse the attention of some sort of bogeyman.

However, he had no need to fear anybody like the Hat Man and I was about to reassure him that he only had to worry about somebody who could take a switchblade and carve a billboard into that guy's chest so that other shadow people would know not to fuck with him.

"Hey, kid, you're awake, that's good," Save for the introduction, I wouldn't waste any time getting him on track, "Listen, I need you to go to the basement in this house and grab a light bulb for me. You see, you're in a bit coin mine and I need you to screw it into this big gyroscope at the geographical center of this place and I need you to haul ass over there so I can start making some big moolah again. There's a cut in it for you, too, I'll even let you have your first cocaine bump if y-"

I noticed he wasn't looking at me so I shouted at him, "HEY! UP HERE, DIPSHIT! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU!?" Before I brought him to this place, I had a guy, who was sort of a doctor and owed me a favor, to surgically implant a chip in his brain that would get him to hear me when I spoke to him so he would not need headphones like Rachis did with his transmitter. The chip was also a bomb and a heartbeat monitor that kept tabs on my vital signs so it would detonate either at my command when I said a specific passphrase in a specific tone of voice or when my vitals flatlined, so I could make sure that he would never outlive me.

He was supposed to be hearing me at that moment. Had I needed to track down the quack who installed this thing so I could let my foot teach a lesson to his balls and give an extended private tutoring session to his head?

"Hey, kid, listen!" I shouted, refusing to realize that he couldn't hear me, "I'll make it easy for you since you seem to be a little bit on the slow side of the bell curve. You got to get the door unlocked with a code on the computer. I set this up to test your intelligence, but I'll give you a hint in five minutes if you're too retarded to figure it out."

Niko's first instinct was, actually, to check the computer. When he saw that he needed a four-number code to access the desktop: he went to the adjoining bathroom, no doubt to get a drink of water from the sink because he was panting with thirst. He tried to turn on the faucet for cold water but nothing came out. He tried the one on the bathtub but he had no luck. He even checked the toilet but there was water in neither the bowl nor the tank. He noticed that there was a withered potted plant by the doorway and broke off one of its branches out of a spontaneous compulsion and pocketed it before going back to the bedroom to check out the bookshelf, skimming through spines with his index finger in search of some clue.

Other than a volume entitled "Ad infinitum," every book on those shelves were working titles for manuscripts I had been working on and off throughout the years such as "Ass-Ravaging Goblin Sharks in New Hampshire: Terror on Two Legs," "Coping with Alien Abduction," and "Maternity Wards and Escaped Zoo Animals: A True Murder Story Committed by Me and How I Got Away With it."

He found the one entitled "Ass-Ravaging Goblin Sharks in New Hampshire 2: Outback Rampage" particularly interesting because the spine had a picture of a great white shark holding a boomerang in its fin and wearing a digger hat.

He flipped through it to see if there were any illustrations for him to look at but he held the book open to read the climax on Page 384 and read it aloud, "'Sheila tried to resist at first, putting up a futile resistance to the rabid shark's ravenous ravishing but she was soon overcome with ecstasy and began pouring out her heart to it, telling it secrets she would never tell her husband. And then the shark rubbed her womb to stimulate a portio orgasm and she cried into the night, Oh, Shark, she said, I love you so much. Please, bite my head off! And the leviathan complied by digging its many rows of teeth sexually into her head and her legs kicked around erotically as, in the final moment of her life before her head got decapitated and digested within one of the four stomachs of the shark, she got the best multiple orgasm in her life...'"

Although he giggled like a tittering Phillistine when he narrated my tour-de-force literary masterpiece, Niko had a remarkable reading comprehension for a child his age. Perhaps he was not as dumb as he looked. Or perhaps he was that dumb because only by chance after he had replaced the book to its original spot on the shelf did he spot a TV remote on the floor. I had used my godlike powers to throw him a bone by conjuring this remote with all but four buttons removed and each one color-coded to indicate the correct combination. Apparently, however, his eyes were not very good at seeing in the dark and he had to bring it over to a window and use the ambient light outside to see the buttons. He was, however, able to figure out the combination on the computer for himself and got the door open in a matter of moments.

He glided through it and ambled down the stairs and immediately obeyed his first instinct to turn on a TV once he spotted it but the screen was shattered and an unidentified organ of its internal electronics gave off a dangerous-looking spark.

That TV was actually owned by one of the contractors and they would frequently take breaks to watch Rachis' televangelist broadcasts, since that was the only programming I would allow in the bit coin mine. However, a scuffle over the last Krispy Kreme-filled glazed doughnut led to several deaths, the collapse of an entire wing of the house, and the present state of the television set.

Undeterred. Niko turned his attention to the kitchen and peeked in the fridge to find a bottle of Jägermeister. He licked his lips, I could imagine that his mouth felt like soggy cotton fermenting in the hot sun by this point. He twisted the cap off and took a generous swig. Rather than having his thirst slaked, he gagged and had a coughing fit, spilling some of the licoricy nectar onto the floor and letting it slip through the floorboards. Perhaps he could have been smart but he sure as hell couldn't hold his liquor. Perhaps, I should have stocked the fridge with wine coolers.

He shivered and noticed a fireplace with a Duraflame log nestled in its cradle. I suppose he figured that if he couldn't get anything to drink, he could warm himself up instead. I was further surprised to see him pull the branch from his pocket, dip it in the Jägermeister, and light it up by getting the busted TV to spit out an electric spark. Prissily, holding the torch between his fingers, he scrambled for the fireplace and flicked it onto the log, making a warm, comforting fire for him to sit back and loaf around next to. At this moment, I was under the impression that I would have to take a nap but, for whatever reason, Niko looked over his shoulder to spot something on the floor. It didn't become apparent to me what he looked at until he waltzed over to a seemingly random spot on the floor and bent over to pick something up. He tried going over to the front door near the stairs but that did not have a keyhole in it. What it did have was an indentation with a light bulb icon that signified that Niko needed to open it by presenting the light bulb I kept in the basement. Niko wasted no time in trying the door on the opposite side of the room and tried it in that one.

Much to his satisfaction, the key worked and he leisurely swung the door open and felt for a light switch. However, he was unable to find one and he hesitated, probably wondering if there were any monsters in the basement, and he needed a moment to muster the courage to make his way down. I decided to make things a little interesting by conjuring an oil slick on one of the steps. I opened Bandicam to get footage of him stepping on my trap and I was able to hit 'record' before he took a slipped on it and landed on his ass, screaming in fright as he slid down a roller coaster of humiliation that was so wacky that it made Daniel Stern's slapstick routine in Home Alone look like a setpiece in an Ingmar Bergman film. He made an abrupt stop at the bottom of the stairs, breaking his nose, and he spent so much time bawling his eyes out that I streamed it on Youtube and got over 400 people making donations to me in superchat, making a cool $10,000 to my account, before he was done.

When he stopped his incessant sobbing and my stream's audience tapered off, Niko refused to move, paralyzed with fear. He had been curled in the fetal position for some time and his eyes were darting back and forth. I wondered if he was afraid that there may have been monsters in that very basement with him.

I could have fucked with him some more by playing the Fast Zombie sound effects from Half-Life 2 but I really wanted to get this show on the road so I illuminated the path towards the light bulb.

His eyes darted nervously and he tiptoed along the shining path with reticient footsteps, as though he were sneaking down to the kitchen after midnight to pilfer the Halloween candy dish. However, the tension in his posture melted away and he toddled over to the glowing treasure he was meant to take.

Without taking heed to caution, he scooped the light bulb into his hands and allowed its radiant warmth to comfort him. It would have been funny to heat the bulb to a higher temperature so that Niko's hands would have been scalded with weeping blisters or even heated to the intensity of a kiln so his hands would have melted off and he would be stumbling around, screaming like the dumb animal he was but then he would have dropped the bulb and shattered it, along with my dreams of financial prosperity, so I had to suppress the temptation to do that.

I also had to restrain myself from fucking with him as he bounded up the stairs and raced to the front door to insert the light bulb into the indentation. I watched as he stopped himself short of slamming into the door, he took a deep, calming breath and slid the light bulb into it.

"What?" that was the first time I ejaculated a word out of my mouth in surprise, rather than ejaculating something else from another orifice on my other head, in a long time. Niko had vanished into thin air and I had to check the encrypted virtual world feed, which was exactly like the floating green Japanese text that the crypto-Confucian anarcho-punk terrorists in the Matrix look at on their computer monitors in the real world to look at simulacra in the simulation (a/n: see what I did there? I made a reference to the Jean Baudrillard book that the Wachoski Brothers drew their inspiration from for their movie. I'm cultured, unlike you uneducated, homeland-generation farm animals), in order to trace Niko's location to a derelict rail coach in the western portion of the Barrens.

I zoomed in on Niko fitfully scanning his surroundings. There was nary a doubt in my mind that he felt the presence of a hundred souls wrongfully taken from this world before their time. I wasn't sure what he was so scared about, though, because he was holding a nightlight that was big enough to make the bogeyman jizz his pants in terror. Still, he probably did have a good reason to be freaked out because this coach was a remnant of the elevated monorail line I had ostensibly commissioned to be built in order to make the workers' commutes from the Barrens to the Refuge shorter but I actually had it built so I could accelerate the trains beyond reasonable speeds and derail them while they were loaded with passengers and send them tumbling around the countryside, knocking over houses, crushing bystanders, and turning the unfortunate souls within the iron bellies of their caskets into crimson paste like a cat bouncing around in a dryer. Upon searching the cars, their would-be rescuers would find that they were not looking into runaway rail cars to find survivors: they were looking into giant metal eclairs stuffed with sanguine jelly-filling which were getting eaten away by scarabs I had conjured to clean away all evidence of the passengers' existences.

Fortunately for Niko, I purged the scarabs out of the mine a long time ago but I wish I still had them around so I could motivate him to get his ass moving. Fortunately for me, I was not one to ruminate about the 'shoulda-woulda-couldas' of life and I opted to take advantage of Niko's fear of ghosts and dropped a little meteor from the sky on him. When it struck the back of his neck, he screamed and ran away like a bitch. Sprinting for his life, he bumbled his way to the southern reaches of the Barrens. He stopped in his tracks upon spotting the first inhabitant he had encountered since he arrived in this place. It was a robot that looked like a rejected character design from Cave Story, right down to the headphones with antennas that served as ears, and it had a camera lens for a face that looked at him as though it was expecting him. Niko took calm strides over to this robot and said timidly, "h-hello?"

"Welcome to our world, little one," the robot's heavily vocoded voice had little difficulty in conveying a sense of friendliness, "I am most humbled by your presence."

"Uh.. Thanks..." Niko awkwardly stalled in silence trying to think of something else to say and it felt like a goddamned eternity before he said anything else, "I'm a little lost."

"Ah, right, I will explain." said the robot, "may I first ask how you arrived here?"

"I'm not really sure..." I would explain those details to Niko in due time, "I woke up in an unusual house and-"

The cocksucking robot interrupted Niko and took credit for my shit and Rachis Canseco's, "I see! Just as my prophecy foretold! You're the Messiah we've been waiting for. You'll be the one to bring salvation to this world by lighting the sky once more with the power of the new sun that you carry in your hands and vanquish the eternal darkness."

The Homotron 9000 twirled around like a ballerina and I resolved at that moment to rip this piece of shit's innards out and have them sold as bootleg Ipods in Beijing.

"Um..." Niko was bewildered by the robot's mating ritual. It probably wanted to diddle him.

"Ask me anything you'd like."

"Well, you see, in this house I woke up in: I found a computer that had a microsoft account on it that belonged to a Jesús Martíne. Do you know who that is?"

"He is our god! Have you contacted him yet?"

"...Huh?" Niko ejaculated cluelessly.

"The traditional name of our god is Jesús Martíne. I'm not sure of the origin of his name." Some robot he turned out to be. If he had a hard copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica on his solid state drive: he'd know damn well that my name was of Spanish origin, "being the bringer of our sun, you have the ability to communicate with him. How I envy you!" said the gutless little kiss-ass, "Close your eyes and try it!"

Niko did close his eyes, "well..." he slipped into a meditative trance, not bad for a heathen monster that probably never heard of pilates. "hello? Jesús Martíne?"

I immediately tried talking into the chip's microphone "Testing 1, 2, 1, 2!"

"Oh! I heard something, is that you, Jesús Martíne?" Niko's excitement stirred in his voice like Swiss Miss hot cocoa powder stirring in a cup of warm raw milk (a/n: a little tip to the wise: pasteurization makes milk more harmful to drink. My buddies use it to make you physically weaker and easier to influence through mass media so it will be easier to kill you off so we can actually be the smartest ethnic group on the planet without having to skew IQ test results so we can pretend that we are. You should make a deal with your local dairy farmer to buy raw milk from him. Don't thank me for this life-saving advice, thank you for reading this far into the story).

"CAN YOU HEAR ME!" I shouted into the microphone.

Niko yelped. He brought his hands to ears and nursed them like he had an ear ache, "Not so loud! That really hurt!"

"Ah, good, so you can hear me!" I said, "Listen, kid, these backwards asshole robot fucktards have-"

Niko gasped, "those are bad words!"

"Here's another bad word for you: I don't give a shit. Anyway, these assholes have been getting my name wrong for-fucking-ever. My name is actually Vainglory and I want you to call me by that from now on."

"Oh, sorry, I didn't know your name was really Vainglory."

"Yeah, at least you have an excuse." I cleared my throat because some bits of kettle chips that I had for a mid-afternoon snack went down the wrong pipe, "Okay, listen: I'll explain everything. You know that light bulb in your hand?"

"Yes?"

"In this world, that is their sun. You have to go to the geographical center of this world and screw it into this aperture, or whatever you call it, in that huge tower over yonder."

"Wait, what tower? I don't remember seeing one."

"Oh, Christ! Just open you eyes and look at it, you can't miss it!"

Niko opened his eyes and scanned for it with the frantic arousal of a deer who had just heard a twig snap.

"OVER THERE! BEHIND YOU!"

Niko turned 90 degrees behind him, still missing the tower.

"FUCKING BEHIND YOU! RIGHT THERE, COME ON!"

Niko spun another 90 degrees and finally saw it. His breath was taken away and his knees fell victim to weakness as he stepped back in awe at the sheer size of the tower.

"That's the biggest building I've ever seen in my life!"

"Yeah, you like it? It's three times taller than the Trump Tower in New York City."

"I've never heard of that place."

"You don't need to. That place is a garbage pit filled to the brim with the crustiest scumbags and slimiest nu-males on Earth. We also got better pizza in the Refuge."

"What's the Refuge?"

"It's the city surrounding the tower where the consumerist whores live as opposed to the backwards granola-munching, goat-worshipping screwheads that live in the Glen."

"What's-"

"You'll find out eventually. Look, just take that light bulb to the tower and screw it in, got it?"

"Will I be able to go home after I screw it in?"

"Yes, of course you will. Just go, already!"

"Hey, Mr. Vainglory, you sound really angry. Mama always says that you should take a few deep breaths and relax whenever you feel stressed out."

"Well, you're mother's a whore; she sold you to me as a sex slave in the middle of the night while you were asleep and she thanked me for taking you off her hands by giving me a BJ. So, are you really going to believe anything yo mama tells you?"

"Whaa-?!" Niko's face contorted into a strange shape. The shock was too great and too sudden for his face to properly convey an expression of anguish and sorrow.

"Yeah, it's true, kiddo," It wasn't, but, I told him this lie to keep him emotionally tethered to me. As far as he knew at that moment: his mother committed the most unforgivable act of betrayal a mother could perpetuate against her son without having the bare decency to say goodbye to him and I was the closest thing he would have to a parental figure.

"Mama… How could you..."

"How could a woman like her do that? Very easily, as a matter of fact," I said. Niko had had his eyes cast down so I knew precisely what to say at that moment, "You're better off not thinking about her, kid. As Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings once said: 'there ain't no good in an evil-hearted woman' and you sure as hell don't look like you're cut out to be no Jesse James, if you know what I mean."

"Who's Jesse James?"

"He's a pretty obscure historical figure. You've probably never heard of him. But, anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that you can never go home."

"Wait! I thought you said I could go home!"

"Whatever, I lied. Just shut the fuck up and stop interrupting me, already! Anyway, you got something better here than you've ever had in all the time you lived on that hellhole you call a home planet."

"That's not a nice thing to say about my home planet."

"So what, kid? What has it ever done for you? Unlike this place, it didn't make you the Messiah."

"Messiah? What's that?"

"Seriously? The robot just told you, like, a minute ago."

"I'm sorry, this is a lot to take in at once. I mean, I still can't believe my Mama sold me into slavery."

"You better believe it, boy!"

"Um... Mr. Vainglory, I don't want to be rude but is it okay if you don't call me a 'boy'? I identify as being of ambiguous gender so I prefer it when people call me a 'they' instead of a 'he' or 'she'."

"Niko, I know you're a boy, I checked you out while you were asleep and I know for a fact that you have a penis."

"Well, uh," Niko stammered as he tried to think of something else to say, "If I do say so, myself, I think it's a very feminine penis..."

"Yeah, you're not wrong about that, kiddo," I grabbed a bottle of Topo Chico from my mini-fridge and chugged it down while Niko shuffled his feet and diffidently cast his eyes to the ground before I continued with my exposition, "Alright, kiddo, it's time to take that dick out of your hand and listen up: you're the Messiah and that means you're the OB/GYN for the vagina of everybody who lives here and your destiny is to thrust your into that vagina until your arm is elbow deep within it and you tickle this world's womb and make her produce a luminescent portio orgasm from the inside."

"Okay…" Niko seemed to be a little unenthused for my own good.

I took it upon myself to stir up some excitement in him by offering incentives, "Niko."

"Yes, Mr. Vainglory?"

"If you make it to the tower and screw that light bulb in, you'll be rewarded with anything you desire."

"Anything?!"

"Yes, anything?"

"So, I can go home?"

"Sure, kid, I'll even serve you up a nice steak from the restaurant in the tower. You can get a nice Ribeye there."

"Well, actually, I don't really like steaks. Can I have pancakes instead? That's my favorite food!"

The notion that a kid evolving from a predatory animal would not like steak was patently absurd to me. Hell, it was patently absurd not to like steaks. If one truly did have a dislike for them: it would make him a contemptible, self-righteous cunt or a decadent heathen. But, I was a master of sweet-talking and I wouldn't betray these prejudices to Niko.

"Hohohoho," I chuckled, "you need not settle for common pancakes, Niko. I shall bring you blintchik. Cats love it."

Niko's eyes widened with nostalgia, "I haven't had blintchik since I was very little and my grandma made them for me."

"Yes, Niko," I said, "And I'll provide you with any toppings you like: butter, sour cream, genuine caviar dredged straight from the Caspian Sea, raw honey taken straight out of a beehive with my bare hands, and maple syrup, The real kind that costs over $30 per bottle in the organic foods section of Intermarché Hyper, with that delectable texture, and not that imitation crap you pour out of a bottle in the likeness of that harlot, Mrs. Butterworth (a/n: I don't know if Intermarché stores have organic foods sections with ridiculously expensive maple syrup; I'm American. The only foreign country I've ever been to was Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah)."

Niko had his eyes closed and he was gasping softly with desire. He caressed himself as though I were personally feeling him up. It almost looked as though he was having an orgasm. I knew at that moment that he was, as Mick Jagger would put it, under my thumb.

"You want them, don't you, Niko?"

"Yes, Mr. Vainglory," he had his own arms in a loving embrace across his chest and twirled around like a giddy ballerina, "I'll do anything for them."

"The feeling is mutual. I would do anything for you, as well. My love for you runs deeper than the bonds shared between a parent and his child or a husband and his wife. Indeed, you are the Muhammad to my Allah," I said. Although, in truth, I wanted to say that he was the Aisha to my Muhammad because I yearned to glide my fingers over his soft, fluffy fur and along the grooves and contours of his supple, nubile body like it was the finest silk before I thrust myself into his tight virgin boipussy and let the blood rush ever faster to my member as his pleas for me to stop and his cries for help from some goody-two-shoes Samaritan who would never come drove me into an orgasmic frenzy.

Niko looked up to me with orgiastic gratitude and adulation. Tears of joy flowed from his eyes as his holy mission instilled a sense of purpose that gave him a reason to live and kindled a hope for a personal salvation that would allow him to overcome the grief brought upon him by his mother's betrayal, "Thank you, Mr. Vainglory. I love you, too!"

Hook, line, and sinker. Children are so witlessly gullible that it's a wonder how they keep themselves alive until adulthood and why we haven't invented a means to grow them to maturity in artificial wombs. They are sexy, though.

"That's good to hear, Niko," my seductive, velvet tones took on a venemous aspect, "but it's not enough that you should merely profess your love for me. You must prove it."

A crowbar descended from the heavens and I beckoned him to take it, "Niko, you see that robot over there?"

"Yes, Mr. Vainglory?"

"Ice him. He cramps my style."

His mouth slacked open to betray his terror and confusion, "B-b-but… He's nice."

"He numbers among the wicked and is deceiving you. He must be culled. Take the weapon I have given you and separate the chaff from the wheat."

"I don't know. I just don't know."

"Did you lie when you said that you loved me?"

"Yes, I love you, Mr. Vainglory. I'm not lying when I say it!"

"Then, prove it. **Kill** **this dork!** "

Niko looked at me as though to say 'is there no other way?' But, he turned towards the robot and did as I commanded him, nonetheless. As he lurched over to the robot, preparing to let go of his inhibitions and unleash my judgment on him: I opened Winamp and played 'Simply Irresistible' by David Palmer to set the mood.

"My Savior," the Robot's fear was but a mere taste of the agony to come, "what are you doing with that crowbar?"

"I'm sorry," Niko sounded detached, probably psyching himself up for what he was about to do, "Mr. Vainglory says you have to die so I can prove my love for him."

 _HOW CAN IT BE PERMISSIBLE!_

"What? NO!" The robot held his hands up to protect his delicate camera eye and continued to plea for mercy.

 _SHE COMPROMISED MY PRINCIPLES! (YEAH YEAH!)_

Niko struck the robot twice in the face and I took delight in his vocoded cries of pain, "Hahaha, good job so far, Niko. Now, listen carefully to my instructions..."

 _THAT KIND OF LOVE IS MYTHICAL!_

I explained to him the means by which to effectively maim and torture that wimpy machine and he followed each step to the letter. He swung his crowbar straight to the robot's most sensitive artificial pain receptors in the crotch.

 _SHE'S ANYTHING BUT TYPICAL!_

And the robot keeled over and emitted a high-pitched scream like some vocoded chimpanzee. Niko then smashed his lens and knocked it over onto its back so that he would be as helpless as a capsized tortoise. And Niko continued to whack the automaton in his stomach as the song played on.

 _SHE'S A CRAZE YOU'D ENDORSE  
SHE'S A POWERFUL FORCE!  
YOU'RE OBLIGED TO CONFORM WHEN THERE'S NO OTHER COURSE!  
SHE USED TO LOOK GOOD TO ME BUT NOW I FIND HER..._

As the machine continued to beg for Niko to stop: the boy scraped his crowbar along the edges of the robot's eye socket so that the glass that had not broken off would fall into it and then I conjured two rats and commanded Niko to toss them into his eye socket.

 _SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE!_

He nervously fussed with the vermin, being careful not to let them bite him, and dropped them into the robot's face.

 _SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE!_

The rats scurried around inside of him, ripping out wires with their teeth just as viciously and ravenously as they would chew off the internal visceral cables within a baby's eye socket.

 _HER LOVING IS SO POWERFUL!_

The robot continued to scream in hellish agony.

 _IT'S SIMPLY UNAVOIDABLE!_

I conjured a bottle of acetone and a zippo lighter for Niko to pour into the hole where his lens used to be.

 _THE TREND IS IRREVERSIBLE!_

He did well enough to spill the acetone into the lens socket but he struggled to get the Zippo working.

 _THE WOMAN IS INVINCIBLE!_

Eventually, he managed to strike a light but he singed his thumb and reflexively dropped it into the robot's hole.

 _SHE'S A NATURAL LAW AND SHE LEAVES ME IN AWE_

The robot's face became a flaming brazier.

 _SHE DESERVES THE APPLAUSE, I SURRENDER BECAUSE_

And the rats leaped out of the fire to sprint away with their asses engulfed in flames.

 _SHE USED TO LOOK GOOD TO ME, BUT NOW I FIND HER..._

I personally struck them with a thunderbolt for each of them.

 _SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE!  
SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE!_

Niko continued to strike him with the crowbar in time to the music.

 _SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE!  
SHE'S SO FINE, THERE'S NO TELLING WHERE THE MONEY WENT!  
SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE!  
SHE'S ALL MINE, THERE'S NO OTHER WAY TO GO!_

"You've done well, Niko" I was proud of him. At that moment, he almost was like a son to me, "leave him."

Niko panted, trying to catch his breath but never getting close enough to lay a finger on it.

 _SHE'S UNAVOIDABLE I'M BACKED AGAINST THE WALL!  
SHE GIVES ME FEELINGS THAT I NEVER FELT BEFORE!_

Niko stared wild-eyed at the robot that was writhing on the ground in an ecstasy of suffering.

 _I'M BREAKING PROMISES, SHE'S BREAKING EVERY LAW  
SHE USED TO LOOK GOOD TO ME NOW I FIND HER_

 _SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE  
SHE'S SO FINE THERE'S NO TELLING WHERE THE MONEY WENT  
_  
Niko was visibly shaken his throat sounded raw, "I-I-I don't know if I can j-j-just leave him like this..."

A dome cover descended from the sky to seal the robot underneath and silence him forevermore.

 _SHE'S ALL MINE THERE'S NO OTHER WAY TO GO-_

I stopped playing the music, "Don't worry about him. It'll take a long time for him to die, but he will eventually." That, was actually another lie. I had made sure that he would be cooking alive for a time exceeding my natural life. If ever there would come a day when he could finally die: it would be when this bit coin mine shuts down. And for all I knew, the thing really did have a soul and, after it died, it would continue to suffer without realizing it had died and would continue to feel the pain as it slowly dissipated over the course of a hundred years like an after-image of the sun that is reluctant to disappear and allow you to see pitch black after you close your eyes again.

"What should I do now?" Niko asked meekly, frightened to cross me.

"What do you think you should do? Find a way out of the Barrens so you can take that light bulb over to that tower over yonder."

"Yes, Mr. Vainglory. I'll get right to it!" like one of the flaming rats: Niko scurried off to fulfill his destiny, perhaps hoping he could outrun my vision. However, Niko was smart enough to realize that he could never really run away or hide from me. I could see everything and I would watch his every move.

I almost felt bad for everything I had done to him and that creepy robot but I learned long ago to convert the negative energy from emotions like remorse or guilt into sexual energy that stimulated my root chakra the same way that I would redirect the ticklishness of getting my feet rubbed by a masseuse into there.

I felt it was appropriate to remind him of his reward at the end of his adventure, "Remember, Niko! You'll get a nice stack of blintchik when you get that light bulb screwed in!"

Niko stopped to give a snappy salute to the sky, "Yes sir!"

Even after what he had just witnessed, our love for each other was undying. It would make the moment when I pulled the rug out from under his feet all the sweeter. Until that moment came, however, we both needed to worry about how he would escape the barrens without breaking the new sun...

(A/N: OH YEAH! I'm back and feeling good, bitches! I could bodyslam a tiger and rip its head off. I just needed some bandages, a jug of orange juice, a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies, a couple weeks bed rest, and a morphine I.V. drip and I'm right as rain. Now, stay tuned for the next chapter!)


	3. Chapter 3

My neighbor from two doors down never locked her door. Whenever she was out, I would sneak into her apartment and piss in her sink so that I could save money on my utility bill. The act of trespassing, and the fear that she could barge in while I was still in here, made me a little horny, so I went into her bedroom and sniffed some of her unwashed panties and then I went to her bed and sniffed her essence under the sheets. I then spilled my seed on her sheets and made her bed the way she had it before. The cumstain would have dried up by the time she got home and she would probably never notice it. I then went to her fridge to steal an A&W Cream Soda and I waltzed on over to the front door as though I had owned the place as a timeshare and was just stepping out for a little while. When I opened it, however, a lone child on a MegaWheels hoverboard reminded me that I did not, in a legal sense, own this place.

"Hey! What are you doing in there!" she shouted.

By instinct, I threw my cream soda in her face and knocked her out with some chloroform that I always kept on my person. I then dragged her back to my own apartment along with her hoverboard (I was sure to get a good twenty bucks for it at Pawn Cash Go on Staten Island as they hadn't caught on that I was fencing stolen goods at that point).

When I got to my own bedroom: I digitized her into my coin mine, sending her into one of my foundling pens, so that she could be used later as a laborer or a hurtcore child porn star. Although my Modus Operandi is never quite the same in every situation, this is how every encounter I have with a lone straggler, whether it be a hobo, hooker, or guttersnipe, ends. In this manner, approximately one-third of 1% of all missing persons cases, as well as 3% of all cases involving children, in the New York-Newark NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area, are perpetrated by me. One can be assured, however, that 100% of them are cold cases.

After I had sent the girl on her merry way, I got into my replica Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin barrel chair. donned my Turtle Beach Elite Pro headset, and opened the video feed on my computer's coin mine feed to check in on my intrepid little messiah.

Since I had left him to wander the Barrens on his own, Niko took to inspecting one of the rowbots. These 'rowbots' were shifty little robo-gypsies that trafficked officially-prohibited contraband, like unsanctioned gas mask filters and asthma inhalers, between the Glen and the Barrens. However, my constabulary refused to arrest them because they declared themselves to be sovereign citizens and grafted themselves onto rowboats in order to be legally classified as stateless sailing vessels occupying international waters under coin Mine Maritime Law.

Niko turned his attention to the sky, "Mr. Vainglory, are you there?"

"No." I said.

Niko flinched as though a crazy, naked homeless man had accosted him with a lascivious jig before presenting him with his asshole that turned out to have an eyeball sticking out that stared back at him but he quickly regained his composure.

"Well, you've certainly got a sense of humor." said Niko.

"Oh, you know it," I said, "wanna hear a dead baby joke?"

"What? Why would you want to joke about dead babies?" Niko said.

"Oh, come on, kiddo, I don't hate babies," I lied, "I just find that kind of stuff funny."

"Well, I don't see what's so funny about that stuff."

"That's because you're a sheltered, thin-skinned, no-humored pansy."

"I guess you're right..." Niko cast his eyes down in shame.

 **"WHAT DO YOU WANT!"**

Niko jittered like a rabbit that had gotten spooked with an airhorn.

"Uh, uh, so anyway," Niko turned his attention to the rowbot, "This robot is attached to the boat but it doesn't seem to have power. If we could find a car battery: I might be able to jump start it."

"How would you know anything about jump starting a car?"

"My uncle showed me how." Niko peered inside of the robot and then stuck his hand inside to feel around for some terminals, "He's a mechanic so he knows a lot about cars," Niko took his hand out and brought his finger to his lip, "but he's so rusty. We should find something to clean him up with before we turn him on."

"Why do you want to fix him? These roto-plookers are bad news; you're better off swimming to the Glen."

And, he would have been. The moat that divided the Barrens from the Glen was only the same distance as fifty laps in an Olympic swimming pool and I do a hundred of them everyday with my membership at Manhattan Plaza Health Club. However, there was only one problem with sending Niko across it...

"Umm… I can't swim."

"Oh, come on, what's so hard about it? It's not like you're Black."

"What do mean by 'black'?"

"Do you have crow people in your world with wings, beaks, and black plumage like in Fritz the Cat?"

"You mean a Kerasu-Tengu? They're scary; they like to riot and drink malt liquor."

"Yeah, exactly, kiddo. And, I bet they're also not good at swimming, either."

"Not any of the ones I know. My swimming instructor was a Kerasu-Tengu and she just told us to jump into the deep end of the pool and 'wing it' while she talked to her friends on her phone."

"Well, did you get good at winging it, or what? Because, I really need you to get that lightbulb across the ocean."

"No, sir."

"It's easy; just lie on your back, keep that lightbulb above water, and kick with your legs. You know, like an otter or something. It's not hard!"

"I can't do it… I'm scared."

I groaned, "Fine! If you're too much of a scared little baby, we'll fix that rowbot. Go find some WD-40 and clean that shit off of it and some jumper cables or something to get it running. God fucking damn it, you're an embarrassment!"

Niko could not muster the courage to look toward the sky. He thought he could avert his eyes from me by staring at the ground. However, there was no angle from which I couldn't see him and there was no facial expression he could make that could conceal the hurt I've made him feel. And it felt satisfying to hurt him. It was like holding a rosebud in the palm of your hand and plucking one of its petals to gently glide your fingers across its soft, velvety skin before clamping down on it and compressing it into an ugly little ball of pulp.

Since he was standing still and allowing his mind to go numb, I took this opportunity to yell at him, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING JUST STANDING AROUND FOR!" I got him to hop to attention and stare at the sky, where I was looking from, in bewilderment, "MOVE YOUR DUMBASS TO THE NORTH!"

"Y-y-y-yes, Mr. Vainglory," he saluted me, "I'll get right on it!"

He rushed for the south.

 **"THAT'S NOT WHERE NORTH IS, YOU IDJIT! TURN AROUND AND GO THAT WAY, YOU STUPID FUCKSTICK!"**

"I'm sorry," he sounded like he was about to cry at this point, "I couldn't tell where North was!"

But he scrambled his way to the correct direction without so much as a tear in his eye. Evidently, I was not trying hard enough to really wring some of that sweet nectar of innocence out of him.

To the north of the dock, however, were the hydrogen sulfide vents where those construction workers died. When Niko had arrived there, the vapors that poisoned the air oozed into his mouth and he spasmed into a hacking fit.

"Mr. Vainglory," his voice was strained from breathing in too much of the gas and he constantly interrupted himself with compulsive coughing, "I need to get... out of here or… or… or else I'll suffocate!"

"Whats the matter, kid," I said In a mocking tone, "Can't handle a little smoke?"

I knew he would need a gas mask, being a child of an extradimensional species that was undocumented in any of our medical literature probably meant that he had sensitive lungs, but I taunted him anyway to crush his spirits.

"I'm sorry… Mr. Vain.. Glory… I can't go on," He lurched his way to the south.

"Hey," I shouted, "I didn't tell you that you could go back!"

But he ignored me. He kept coughing until he was far enough away from the geyser field to kneel down and clear his throat.

"Mr. Vainglory," Niko's voice was hoarse, "I don't think I can go back there again."

"Pathetic. I'm the closest thing to a parent that you have and you would still rather disappoint me than get a little sewer gas in your lungs."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Vainglory." Niko kneeled down, allowing me to see through his adorable little wizard robe with my godlike powers of x-ray vision and see the accentuation of his plump, voluptuous thighs, "Please, forgive me."

"If you insist on groveling like a dog: wear this, then!"

I conjured a spiked dog collar with a circular name plate dangling from it that said "fuckboi" and I commanded him to take off his clothes, put the tag on, stick out his tongue, roll his eyeballs all the way up to his brows, and hold the first two fingers of his left hand with a "V for Victory" sign. I screencapped him in this pose and later photoshopped this moment in GIMP with a big, throbbing penis blasting his mouth with cum. I later showed my work of art to him before uploading it to Gelbooru. Later that evening, I would share this on Michael Ian Black's twitter feed. I thought he would like it since he liked to tweet about raping babies so much, but he had it removed and never mentioned it, supposedly because he thought a fine-looking boy like Niko was too old for him.

"Now, get up and put your clothes back on, you sack of shit," I shouted, "and march on over to where you killed that robot!"

More or less to my satisfaction, he did as I told him. Once along the way, he complained about stepping on gravel because he was barefoot so I had to toss some knockoff Air Jordans at him. I got a good laugh when both shoes hit him in the face. Eventually, with both of his feet protected by his trendy footwear, he made it over to the hut where the robot he beat within an inch of his life lay forever tormented in his prison.

"Go inside," I commanded, "there might be something we can use."

Without a word, Niko traipsed inside.

A mess of work orders, memorandums, scientific notes, and diary entries scattered about the floor and piled up in mounds on tables greeted him when he entered. But, quaintly enough, the bookshelves were barren, save for a 7-11 Big Gulp cup, A VHS copy of Wolfen, and...

"Hey, Mr. Vainglory!" Niko pointed his finger at one of the higher shelves, "I think I see a screwdriver up there!"

"Up where," I asked. However, my eagle eye noticed it sticking out from the precarious height of the top shelf, "Oh, now I see it."

Niko set aside the lightbulb and grabbed a step stool from a nearby table. He was then taking it over the bookshelves.

"Hey, woah, woah, woah, what the hell are you doing?"

"I'm going to use this stool so I don't fall."

"Oh, no, you don't! You're going to climb the shelves like the monkey you are!"

"But, I'm not a monkey."

 **"YOU ARE WHAT I TELL YOU YOU ARE! CLIMB!"**

Niko then scrambled up the shelves like Com Truise climbing a big rock in Monument Valley during the opening of Mission Impossible 2 and snatched the screwdriver. However, the shelves toppled, threatening to break his ribs in half like a fat chick about to bellyflop a chubby chaser. Fortunately for him, his feline reflexes allowed him to vault over the bookshelf and safely land on its backside as it crashed against the floor.

"Good job, Niko. I had you climb that thing to test your agility."

This was kind of a lie. I had no idea what was going to happen when I made him climb the shelves.

"Did I pass the test?" Niko looked to me, starving for attention like Blondi starving for the antidote after getting fed her cyanide doggy treat.

"Barely. You did a good job getting out of the way when you had to, but that shelf would have never come down if you only dropped a few pounds off your fat ass."

"Sorry..."

"Whatever. Go check out that room over there and see if you find anything useful."

"Okay, Mr. Vainglory," he said as he walked over to the lightbulb to pick it up.

I found it endearing how he called me 'mister' Vainglory. Every time he called me that, I was reminded of how Gohan in Dragon Ball Z would call the big green demon man 'Mr. Piccolo'. Being a fan of good Shonen Jump manga, as opposed to shit ones like My Hero Academia, Jojo, and Sam and Max: Surfin' the Highway, I always felt that Toriyama's approach to writing, that is to say, write yourself into a corner and then write yourself into another one to get yourself out of the first corner, is the real formula for genius when writing a truly compelling story and that's why I always felt that the twist that Piccolo was really an Alien when he was already established as being a demon to be nothing short but a stroke of-

"OH! Mr. Vainglory," Niko interrupted my train of thought, "I think I found a car battery! Maybe we can use it to power up that robot!"

He did, indeed, find a battery. But I explained to him that it wasn't made for cars. It was a solar battery for recharging smaller ones. Since there was no sun, it was hooked up to a jar of phosphor shrimp to get its power. I also had to explain to him that the shrimp was a food and energy source for the inhabitants of the coin mine.

"So where can I find a smaller battery for this big one?" asked Niko.

"How the fuck should I know," I said, "check out that box with the flashing LED's, over there."

Niko stepped over to the box as I told him. He was intrigued by how it had no latches or any other means to open it.

"Ah! There might be something useful inside of this box," Niko paused for a moment before saying something completely ignorant, "I just wish I had something to pry it open with."

"Yeah, like, maybe a claw hammer or a _crowbar_. IF ONLY WE HAD ONE OF THOSE."

Niko stared at me with a wet, unblinking, bovine expression on his face.

"IF. ONLY. WE. HAD. ONE. OF. THOSE!"

Niko never wiped the vacant, bewildered stare from his face.

 **"YOU HAVE A CROWBAR, ALREADY, PULL IT OUT!"**

Niko's stare widened, first, into an expression of terror and, then, realization, "That's right! You gave it to me when you had me, um," his voice faltered a little, "kill that robot."

"Heh heh heh, yeeeeah." I drew it out like a long toke from a joint, "That beatdown was tighter than a pair of bike shorts on a Taiwanese ladyboy. You worked that crowbar hard like Gordon Lightfoot on a headcrab zombie."

"A what?" he said. He had popped the box open while I was talking.

"It's just one of those things we have on our planet. It's a real animal, by the way."

Niko peered inside the box, "Ah! It's a smaller battery! We can charge this up!"

"Atta boy, kiddo!" my praise was positively glowing like the burden he carried with him, "Put it in the slot!"

"Hold on," Niko pulled out a slip of paper and glanced over it, "I found a recipe for a cleaning solvent: you just need to combine hydrogen sulfide with an emulsifier and it's supposed to work better than a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser!"

"Awesome," I was genuinely proud of Niko, "We can use it to make a bomb and blow up a daycare center with it!"

"What?! NO!" Niko had forgotten his place.

"Hey!" I shouted sternly, my pride in him completely forgotten, "I don't like that tone you're taking with me!"

"Oh, sorry," Niko cleared his throat and corrected his behavior, "Uh, I was actually thinking maybe we could use this cleaning solution to wipe up that robot by the dock."

"Yeah, we could do that, too, I guess."

"Anyway, I'll go see if I can get a charge on this little battery."

Niko sashayed his way over to the large battery and inserted the little one into its port. However, it did not seem to be working as the larger one gave no indication that it detected anything had been plugged into it.

Niko looked down on the batteries with dejection, "I don't think it's working. Maybe the phosphor shrimp aren't good enough to charge it up. If only we had a real sun..."

"You're holding one." I said.

"But this is just a lightb-" Niko's eyes had suddenly been pried wide open, "OOOH!"

He held the lightbulb over the battery's solar panel for a few minutes before his arms got tired. Nothing happened.

"I don't think it worked, Mr. Vainglory."

"You're not holding it hard enough. Do it again!"

Niko held it over the solar panel for another minute before his arms resigned themselves to terminal melodram patheticism like cockroaches languishing in Nicolas Cage's mouth before his teeth crunched down on them, instinctively knowing that it's useless to fight fate.

I looked down upon Niko with scorn, "Some messiah you turned out to be. Jesus could turn water into wine and you can't even recharge a goddamned solar battery with the sun!"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Vainglory. I don't know what else to do."

"Never mind, we'll come back to this thing later. Let's just look elsewhere."

Niko pulled out the portable battery. He limped his way out of the hut, hobbled by my stern chastisements. At my behest, he set foot for the east, making his own lonesome, unpaved path along a sea of endless dirt, occasionally flanked by the shadows cast by mine carts on half-finished railways, poison geysers, strange syrup pools, and nameless ghost towns of ramshackle shanties that seemed to creep up on Niko like the malicious, molesting hands of miserly ghosts.

I got tired of watching Niko trek across the arduously vast expanses of desert so I booted up Nesticle to waste some time with Lunar Pool.

My recollection of the time I spent playing that game during the afternoon is hazy at best (I mean, it's Lunar Pool, It comes with every bootleg 2-billion-games-in-one plug-and-play console under the sun so what's there to remember about it?), but it wasn't long before I heard Niko cry out for me.

"Mr. Vainglory! I think I found something!"

I hit Alt + F4 on my game and switched over to the camera feed on my coin mine.

"Mr. Vainglory!" Niko shouted again.

"Hey, Niko Suave," I said, a bit curious to see what he found "What's up?"

"I found this sponge!" Niko held it up as though it was something to be proud of, "I wonder what it was doing here."

He looked around with naive curiosity in his eyes, eager to explore the fetid swamp of pools upon pools of shrimp-spawning slime.

I offered my own explanation, "One of the workers probably thought it would be a good idea to take a bath in one of the ponds around here. Poor bastard's skeleton is probably completely disintegrated by now, that stuff will eat through you like a Yąnomamö cannibal from the asscrack of Africa." I took a moment to savor the fear on Niko's face as an artist would take a moment to admire the first few strokes he painted on a canvas, "if we're lucky, we might still be able to see his skull floating around in one of them."

Niko cringed in fear and fitfully scanned his surroundings.

"Yeah," I thought I would toy with him a little more; put a little wash into my painting, "I heard that there's also a hand that comes out of these pools. It's a long, scabby, bloody thing that slowly reaches for your leg from behind before it snatches your ankle and takes you down into one of the pools."

Niko was now jumping around. His eyes darted around like a PCP-addled crazy man in a San Francisco BART station. Would the hand come to take him and drag him off into one of the pools? Would it introduce him to some haggish, decrepit creature with a toothless grin and sunken eyes that had eldritch lights in them like the corpse-lights that bathed the dead city of Minas Morgul? Would it eat him? Which pool would it come from?

"I'm scared, Mr. Vainglory!"

"Don't worry, you have that lightbulb. It won't get you as long as it stays on. But, oh wait, what's this?"

I used my godlike powers to deliver the final glaze to my masterpiece and make the lightbulb flicker. Niko took a moment to stare at it with his mouth wide open as though he had a scream that was too big to come out (or, perhaps, a cock that was too big to fit in his mouth). Then, his legs gave way to panic and he bolted out in a mad dash for the north. As he ran, his voice finally broke through as the screams squeezed through the narrow bottleneck in his throat. I howled with such laughter that my next door neighbor came by to tell me to cut it out and I responded by knocking him out with a punch to the face and dragging him into my digitizer; my subordinates in the human trafficking trade would be able to tell by his effeminate manbun that he would make a good sex slave (this is also how I make coin).

Before long, however, Niko found himself within the foreboding shadows of the dormitories, where my workers made themselves at home as sardines made themselves at home within a tin casket. By my policy, ten people would be assigned to live in rooms hardly big enough for a couple. The reasoning behind this was that, as the rate of workplace deaths reached their peaks for each quarter, the attrition rate (that is to say, the rate of fatal accidents) would allow for easements on the amount of workers boarding in each room, allowing for more comfortable living spaces with each passing week, thus raising morale. However, by my intentional design, it was not unheard of to have dorm rooms that were completely empty and, yet, many dorms would continue to have ten occupants because my policy did not allow for transfers to other dorms. Since there was no work to be done, what with the sun being gone and the shrimp getting too close to extinction to be useful, I laid off all of my workers. In spite of their whining for pensions and their gripes about the lack of jobs back in the refuge: they received no severance packages and many of them still haven't paid off the debt they incurred while occupying my facilities (as I have tried to explain to them, they don't board at these dormitories for free).

"Uh, Mr. Vainglory..." said Niko.

"What?" I said.

"I'm a little tired from walking, is there a bedroom where I can sleep in one of those buildings?"

"They're dorms; of course, there are."

"Is it okay if I do?"

If this little shit didn't need my constant supervision: I would have told him to keep walking around until he found some stuff to get that robot fixed. However, I was pretty tired, myself, so I saw no harm in putting this brat to bed and I gave him my permission.

In a matter of moments, Niko tucked himself into bed. He had rushed into the building and used his intuition to pick a room for himself.

 _"Are you all snuggly, Niko?"_ I asked, sarcastically affecting a gooey, matronly accent.

"Yes, Mr. Vainglory, but," he was afraid to ask and had to build up his courage to do so, "could I have some water? I'm a little thirsty."

"Ugh, fine," I used my godlike powers to conjure a glass of water into his hands.

"Um, Mr. Vainglory," Niko said softly, not wanting to sound ungrateful, "is it okay if I have some ice cubes?"

 **"RAAAAGH!"** I screamed as I conjured three frosty hailstones and hurled them into his glass, **"HERE YOU GO, YOUR MAJESTY!"** As each hailstone bounced into the glass: the water it held splashed out. Some of this water sprayed Niko in the face but the rest of it spilled onto his blanket. I was tempted to conjure a rain cloud and soak his blankets with it so he would have to endure a miserable, restless sleep but I was pretty tired and itching to play Turrican II on an Amiga emulator before going to bed, myself.

Niko took a hurried swig from the glass like a dehydrated fawn slurping from a stream and being well aware that a wolf was out for his meat, "Thank you, Mr. Vainglory," He set it aside, prissily but hastily, on his nightstand, "I'm sorry I made you mad," and he pulled his sheets over his head.

I could tell that his hands were clutching the blanket's hems to make an airtight seal around himself but it could not conceal the shaking outline of his body. He shivered as though he were naked in the frozen, inhospitable wastelands of Alaska's Unorganized Borough, getting bukkaked by a fearsome blizzard. And then, I could hear the sweet lullaby of his weeping. I didn't growl at him like a bloodthirsty lion because I was actually angry, I just wanted to indulge myself in the succulent delights of his tears.

I lapped greedily at his sorrow and jumped right into bed to jack off to the thought of Niko crying as his mom sodomized him with a strap-on while her big titties flopped around, all over the place. After I finished, I drifted off to sleep with wonderful dreams of sex slave hot tubs, Scrooge McDuck money vaults, thrones, crowns, and iron-fisted gloves going through my head. That boy would make my dreams a reality; this was the future I beheld and the future held no room for any other, certainly not one with him in the picture.

(A/N: Sorry, it's been a while. Had to dodge the Feds AND the Mounties. I'm in Mexico now.)


	4. Chapter 4

Being of a mind as brilliant as Nikola Tesla's: I only needed to sleep for two hours and I felt like I could grab the world by the hair and ride it like an over-sized mutant dog. I leapt out of bed to check on my Messiah.

Niko was still fast asleep. Of course, he was! Children are weak and stupid and need 10 hours of sleep to help develop their brains. That weakness is fun to exploit and I used my godlike powers to peer into his dreams so, by analyzing them, I could make surgical incisions into his mental Achilles tendon at any opportune moment.

At that moment, He was dreaming about waltzing through a poppy field like the big sissy he was. But then his dreams took an abrupt turn and he was being served pancakes by his mom who, oddly enough, did not have big ol' titties. In fact, she was improbably flat.

And then, he woke up.

"Mr. Vainglory, are you there?" Niko was apprehensive to ask that. He was probably hoping that I wouldn't respond.

He was shit out of luck, though.

"Good morning, kiddo!" I put him at ease with my friendly tone of voice, "Did you have a nice dream last night?"

"I sure did!" In spite of his initial apprehension, Niko was excited to tell me about his precious little romp through a field of buttercups, "I dreamed about mama, last night. And I was..."

"I KNOW WHAT YOU DREAMED ABOUT!" I bewildered Niko with my mercurial change of mood, "I saw it; I have telepathy and I can see what people are dreaming."

"Oh..." He assumed a more submissive posture.

"Yeah, she made you pancakes, huh?"

"Yeah! She made it by putting nuts in the goop, and-"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't care. What I really want to know is why the hell didn't you dream about her having titties? She was flat as a goddamned ironing board, what's wrong with you?"

"Huh? Uh, I don't understand. What are titties?"

"You know, boobs, the big round mounds that grow on women's chests. Do you even pay attention to what your mom's chest looks like, kiddo?"

"Well, uh… I never really thought about her chest..."

I conjured a Polaroid of her in a Cleopatra's Secret nightie with arrows doodled on it to point directly at her huge bazongas. (a/n: Cleopatra's Secret is, Essentially, the Martian Nekomata version of Victoria's Secret. It's a weird alternate universe where every store is exactly like ours, except with a different name, but even that place has Bath and Body Works stores in its malls just like in every other alternate universe, even the ones where no terrestrial animals, let alone sapient species capable of metacognition, ever came into existence because of evolutionary flukes during their Paleozoic eras).

"See those arrows?" I asked, "They're pointing at her hooters because they're something you're supposed to pay attention to."

Niko looked at them with a deadpan expression, "I guess I never really did notice them before.."

"Yeah, I suppose it's hard for a pre-pubescent child to notice such things when he hasn't awakened his sexual desire yet. But, you got to know that if she was as flat as you dreamed her to be: it would have been impossible for her to be your mother because women with flat chests are incapable of producing an adequate supply of milk for breast-feeding."

I noticed he was getting a boner from looking at his mom's polaroid. I had a dilemma as to whether I should yell at him to scare and shame him about his deficient Westermarck effect or I should let him keep growing that meat shaft because I could have found myself sandwiched between a wincestuous threesome if I was able to hold his mother against her will and coerce them into being my sex slaves.

I never did decide on what to say, however, because another idea popped into my head like Niko's dirty little boner (which is actually not barbed like an Earth cat's penis; it does not even have a baculum. It's pertinent to explain this because you should always keep that in mind as you read this transmission/autobiography)…

"Hey, Niko, I got something else I want to show you."

"What?," he immediately realized he asked in an improprietous tone and changed it, "I mean, yes, Mr. Vainglory?"

I conjured a flipbook and sent it down to him on a little cloud. I explained what it was to him, how it was like a movie made of paper that you used your thumb to flip through each frame..

His pupils widened into deep, black pools of curiosity, ready to behold whatever wonders he would encounter. As he flipped through the pages, however, his curiosity turned to confusion and then perturbation.

"Mr. Vainglory," Niko was clearly disturbed by what he was seeing, "what's going on in this book?"

I used my best Jam Handy educational short film narrator impression to explain what he was looking at, "That, my young catamite, is what we in the business call a 'Masturbortion.' To explain what that is: I will have to explain what Masturbation and Abortion is," I pulled out my smartphone and read the wikipedia articles for these topics to Niko. "so, with that out of the way: a 'masturbortion' is when a woman is sexually stimulated by extracting the fetus from the womb and then pushing it back in and then pulling it back out again and so forth until she has an orgasm."

"What happens to the fetus?"

"The woman puts it into a blender and makes a smoothee. Keep turning the pages and you'll see."

Niko continued flipping through the book and watched as the woman shoved the aborted fetus into a Cuisenart blender and hit puree. Since she forgot the lid, its guts sprayed all over her but she streaked her finger across her face to wipe off the effluvial gore and put it in her mouth to taste the stuff as if it was cake batter, giving the closest thing to a nice smile she could muster afterwards (it was the best take out of 350 because, every time she did it: she would only give a forced, constipated grimace). She poured the smoothee into a margarita glass and chugged it down. The book ended with her giving a thumbs-up and a rictus grin at the camera; her eyes showed that she was only having a slightly more fun time than Mark Hamill did after drinking lactic discharge from Kathleen Kennedy in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

"Why is she doing this," Niko's pupils had become slitted to allow only the bare minimum of this disgustingly sexy content to offend his cones and rods, "How did you convince her to do this?"

"Well, kiddo, the trick is to make sure a girl has one live baby and then tell her that she has to do anything you tell her to or else you'll rip off each of the baby's fingers, one at a time, and make her watch. And just in case any of your girls think that you're bluffing: show them a movie where you arbitrarily picked out one girl and her baby to get this treatment and you will have them under your complete control."

Niko started to cry and retreat under his blanket as a hermit crab would retreat into its shell to escape from a drunk, mean-spirited teenager with a stick, "My mama would never do that to me! She wouldn't!"

"Oh, now, that's where you're wrong, kiddo. She told me that, when she was pregnant with you, she thought about doing this for an assload of money but was never able to get the right connexions to star in such a movie. Selling you to me was the next best thing for her."

Niko bawled incessantly and blathered inarticulately. I was not in the mood to listen to such ugly crying so I allowed my furious annoyance to tinge my screaming.

" **SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH YOUR CRYING, T** **Ú** **EST** **Ú** **PIDA PEQUE** **Ñ** **A MIERDA**!" I yelled, flying into passionate Latin rage, " **C** **Á** **LLATE TU MARICON BOCA AHORA O TE GOLPEARE CON UN RELAMPAGO, T** **Ú** **MALDITA LISIADA!** "

He would not stop crying so I sprayed him with a little kerosene and lit him on fire with a thunderbolt. He screamed and swung his arms around like an erratic, aggressive panhandler accosting decent people with his violent caveman antics. He tumbled out of bed and scrambled for the outdoors. He threw open the front doors and leapt down the stoop. His feet crashed against the ground and he ran around in circles like a rodeo clown who was barely a step ahead of the pulverizing hooves of Big Badass Bodacious.

I couldn't help but laugh hysterically, "AHAHA! Stop drop and roll, faggot!"

He did as I told him and he managed to put out the flames on his clothes. He breathed rapidly and stared at the sky for a minute before rolling over to take up the fetal position. His breath did not slow down.

"You know now not to cry, Niko?"

"Yes, Mr. Vainglory, I will never do it again. I promise!"

"Good," I ripped the wrapper off of a Dunkin Donuts Iced Coffee that I kept in my minifridge, "you've got a long hike ahead of you, kiddo. There's some cliffs up to the north. Get your ass moving."

Niko heaved himself off of the ground and clumsily found his footing, "Yes, Mr. Vainglory," he took to a walk with a gloomy rhythm, "I'm heading over there right now."

He went inside the Dormitory and came out a minute later with the new sun. He was still taking his sweet time, literally. pussyfooting his way to the cliffs.

"GET OVER THERE FASTER! MAIS RÁPIDO, RÁPIDO!" I called down a bolt of lightning to one of the footprints behind him and he took up a galloping sprint. He clutched the lightbulb with a death grip and I was concerned that he would break it with his fingers, as fragile and delicate as they were, "AND BE CAREFUL WITH THAT GODDAMN LIGHTBULB!"

He sprinted for a few minutes before he had to slow down to catch his breath. I could imagine that his ribs were aching and every breath he took was like having a baseball-sized hailstone bounce around in his lungs.

It would take a while for him to reach them so I stepped out of my apartment to rob a 7/11 in Queens, which was quite an adventure in itself. I shot the Korean store owner in the face and took the shotgun he kept behind the counter and used it on his wife. When I killed them, there was a shit-load of blood and spittle flying out of them that was better than the gore in Menace II Society, and that movie had some pretty wicked sick special effects. I had a real fucking horrorshow time, I tell you what! And then, I planted the shotgun on the wife (I also copped a feel on her ass and titties) to make it look like she shot her husband before turning it on herself so that the police, who were on my payroll, would rule it a murder-suicide and I'd get away with it scot-free.

That little escapade netted me a box of Butterfingers that I shared with my mistress, some gringo asshole's wife that I was fucking behind his back, by using one as a buttplug while I impregnated her. When I heard her husband come home for lunch: I made my exit down the fire escape and thought about what I would do to them once I got my bittcoin mine operational again and could digitize into it with my admin privileges, id est, when I could manifest myself as a physical presence and have full access to my godly powers without crashing my mine. Oh, I would digitize them both into my mine and I would use my powers to shapeshift into a big black man and then asexually reproduce into perfect copies of myself and I would use my 12-foot long python penises to make sure she was airtight while the other copies of myself forced the cuckhold to watch as my one-man-gangbang culminated in a synchronized, simultaneous orgasm. And then the moment would be forever memorialized on

I found a litter of stray kittens near a trashcan and I used one of my butterfingers to lure them into a box. I carried them home with me because they reminded me of Niko.

By the time I got back, Niko had just taken his first step into his destination. The place was deeply scarred, not unlike Niko's psyche, with treacherous escarpments into pitch black abysses around every corner that were ready to swallow any unwary traveler that might plod his way through.

"Careful, Niko, you might fall into one of these ravines."

Niko kept his eyes wide open and tiptoed through the tightrope geological escarpment like a Flying Wallendo on a very narrow mezzanine. He walked along a maze of bluffs, and all the while, he was cringing at the sights of this unfamiliar, hostile region.

During his exploration of this environment, He caught a glimpse of a loose leaf sheet at his foot and picked it up. What he read next unsettled him even further...

THE SAVIOR IS NOT COMING.

AND I AM AFRAID OF THE DARKNESS AND THE DARKNESS WILL ONLY GET DARKER AND DARKER AND DARKER.

TAKING MY LEAVE NOW, FAREWELL.

As far as suicide notes went: it wasn't the most embarrassing I've ever read. It didn't have glaring spelling errors, shitty doodles for illustrations, or a declaration of undying fanhood for Nine Inch Nails so this particular author was made the James Joyce of suicide notes by virtue of having a modicum of competence.

"Mr. Vainglory, what do you think happened to him?"

"What do you think happened to him, you moron? This place is where people come to off themselves when I make them my bitch."

"What do you mean when you say you 'make them your b-word'?"

"Stop embarrassing yourself by mincing your oaths, you queermo. Anyway, what I mean to say is that, more than anything, I find it distasteful for people besides myself to live and die without a broken spirit. There's three things I admire in a good worker: abject timidity, uncompromising obedience, and constant adulation."

"You mean, like, submissiveness?"

"No, I mean do you want me to explain this or do you want to interrupt me the whole time? Now, shut up! Anyway, if you don't have all three of these traits I want in you, then I have no respect for you and you are unworthy of anything more than my contempt. But, what I find more distasteful than a bad worker who can't live the way I want them to is a guy who can't die the way I want them to. I hate it when some asshole tries to go out like a hero. When I kill a guy: I don't want to hear about how I'm gonna get stabbed one day. What I want to hear is them begging like a dog for their squandered lives so they can live on to squander it some more. I want to hear screaming, crying, and, better still, I want them to praise me."

"Praise?"

"Are you surprised, Niko? I'm so fucking awesome that people go out of their way to compliment me as I kill them. They always like to repeat what Camille Yarbrough once said, 'I have to praise you like I should'! HAHA! And then, I torture them to death with the ancient Persian art of Scaphism!"

"What's-" Niko interrupted himself. He didn't want to know. I told him what it was anyway. For those who don't know: you force-feed somebody milk and honey and then drop them in a tub full of more milk and honey and then let them soak in it as the milk spoils. The tub fills with their own piss and shit because that's their toilet from now on, and the vermin get attracted to the bouquet of sour aromas permeating from the tub, and they come to eat away at their flesh. And then, the bite wounds get infected. They die slowly, over the course of a month from this torture that the Devil, himself, wasn't adequate enough in his divine purpose to imagine. It's the sexiest way to watch somebody die, especially a teenage girl, although very young children and babies dying from this also makes for good fap material. Niko puked several times while I explained this to him.

"You want some Emetrol, there, kiddo?" I asked, "if you keep upchucking like that, you'll die of starvation," I watched as Niko stumbled around, trying to keep his balance, "Or maybe you'll just slip in one of those puddles you made. Eeew."

"I'm alright," Niko did not sound alright but his word was as good as the truth. I had equal contempt for both of them. Niko's eyelids suddenly flew open like hatches on a submarine. He took a deep gasp and wagged his finger to the east, "Look, Mr. Vainglory! I see a safe over there!"

I looked to where he was pointing at and, sure enough, there was a safe, half-buried in the mud.

"A metal safe. Seems like it's locked with a six-digit code. I don't think I've seen any codes anywhere. Not since the remote, anyway."

"Try 142857."

"Why?"

"I just used some math. It's complex and scientific."

"You mean like story problems in my math homework?"

"Yeah, I decrypt one-time pads for the CIA as a side job. This shit's a little bit more intricate than what you find in a McGraw Hill 2rd grade Fun with Multiplication textbook."

"Wow, it worked! There's a gas mask in here, too!"

"Oh, really?" I loved how gas masks looked on adorable little things like Niko, "Well, put it on. I want to see what you look like."

Niko strapped it onto his face. He looked like one of those cute cybergoth sluts that I liked to abduct whenever a rave was happening in my neighborhood. Of course, the respirator would always just be for show as it didn't protect them from the stench of the spoiling contents of the Tub.

Niko spoke, "I think this will protect me from the Hydrogen Sulfide coming out of those vents on the other side of the Barrens, Mr. Vainglory!"

"Hey," I said, "you're right. Keep it on, you look fabulous."

"Hey, and there's a weird-looking book in here too," Niko rummaged through the safe once more and pulled it out. He skimmed through its pages, "It's written in a language I've never seen before."

"Hold it up to me! I know, like, twelve languages, including Old Sirenek. And that language is extinct so I can't even have a conversation with anybody."

"Who spoke Old Sirenek before it went extinct?"

"A bunch of Eskimoes in Siberia. Hard to believe that there were Eskimoes there because I thought they were incapable of crossing the Bering Sea so they all lived in Canada and Alaska. It's a wonder how they never made contact with the Russians or Koreans. I mean, they could have walked to France if they wanted since they weren't separated by the ocean, or anything, but I guess their lazy, barbaric minds couldn't muster the ambition to do much of anything besides clubbing baby seals," as I looked over the language, deciphering it turned out to be hopeless task, "Well, I tried. I can't read it."

"You can't?"

"It's not a language I recognize either. I can read the Rongorongo tablets, the Cascajal Block, and the Voynich Manuscript but not this shit."

"Oh, that's too bad.." Niko stuffed the diary into his coat.

"Yeah, it is," and it really was too bad because I was bullshitting him this entire time. I didn't know how to speak Old Sirenek. It would have been cool to know this obscure language to make myself look more sophisticated and cultured than the other guys in the cool linguist's club but it's not like I ever needed to learn a retarded, backwards caveman language that had a six syllable word for the number five or twenty-five different words for husky shit, anyway. "But, anyway, I'm going to need you to go back to those vents. Just walk over to the West and you'll get there sooner."

"Okay," said Niko.

And, with that, Niko beat a path to the vents and I entertained myself by pulling down my pants and preparing one of the orphaned kittens I adopted for a full anal insertion. As I brought new meaning to the word "portable pussy" by squeezing my meatshaft into that kitten's poop chute, I was overcome with fantasies of subjecting Niko to some delightful tortures of my invention. Although, it was hard for me to imagine coming up with something as creative as what the ancient Persians did, I found that I got extremely horny at the thought of hobbling Niko by breaking his knees and elbows so that he couldn't get away from being dipped in a tub of hydrogen peroxide and then putting candirus in after him and watching them climb into his urethra while the chemical bath corroded his skin little by little and left blisters on it.. Actually, why didn't I think of that before? I could have poured hydrogen peroxide on my victims to burn their skin before putting them in the tub full of milk. But, then again, Hydrogen Peroxide was pretty weak as far as caustic substances went. Perhaps I should have just dispensed with chemicals and tossed a few bullet ants in there. The bullet ant's venom has the most painful bite out of any venomous animal on the planet and are intelligent enough to form rafts out of themselves so seeing one of those things floating towards them like one of those spinning tea cups from Disneyland would have been a pretty stressful sight for my victims. But then again, perhaps the bullet ant had a bite that was too painful. Maybe the venom would kill the victim too fast or, perhaps, it wasn't that lethal so what would kill them would have been the adrenaline shock that followed. Or maybe, it would have been better to use a warrior wasp. Or maybe, the hydrogen peroxide was a good idea afteral–

I came. I ejaculated prematurely again. I hated when that happened. I checked to see how the kitten was doing. I think I had killed it because it was bleeding out of its butthole.

I didn't worry about this kitten infecting me with Toxoplasma Gondii because my uncle was good friends with the Soros family and they have vaccines for it that are not available to the public. So, whenever I have sex with anybody, whether by schedule or by surprise: they're the ones that get infected with the parasite while I'm completely fine.

I hopped out of my chair and waddled over to the bathroom with my pants around my ankles to clean the blood and kitten chocolate off of myself. And then I took the dead kitten to my living room fed it to my pet mako shark, Snorkleshy (pronounced snôrk_(ə)l_shī). I kept him in a specially-designed aquarium that worked like an Endless pool so that it would be able to live by keeping itself in constant motion. Snorkleshy gnashed on the kitten with such vicious gluttony that I got over my refractory period and got horny all over again. When I came back, I saw that Niko was standing in front of a Foreman's office in the North region of the Barrens. Without my permission: he had taken his gas mask off. However, he probably did it to save his filter so I was not so mad about it. Also without my permission: he walked with timid footfalls to its front door...

As Niko crossed the threshold into the office, I noticed that he stopped. His jaw dropped open and his eyes lit up with desire. He was shot through the heart by a 9mm Parabellum round from Cupid's Browning Hi-Power of Love.

His eyes met with those of a red-haired robot girl in a grey dress. She pretended to have a goth girl-like blasé attitude to what was transpiring around her by keeping an indifferent expression on her face. But the sparkle in her eyes betrayed her adoration for the lost child at her doorstep.

She allowed her face to light up with a smile, "Well, hi there!" she placed her hands on her knees and bent down slightly as a kindergarten teacher would when greeting a young child, "What's a cute little guy like you doing in a place like this?"

"Uh, hello, ma'am!" Niko voice cracked a little and he had to clear his throat, "I was wondering if you could help me. You see, Mr. Vainglory is making me change the lightbulb in the tower because I'm the Messiah for whatever reason.."

"Oh, you're the Messiah?" she giggled, "Well, I didn't vote for you."

"I didn't know there was an election for that." said Niko.

"It's okay, I'm just kidding," her warmth and humor put Niko at ease.

"You know," the robot said as she crouched down to meet him at eye level, "I've never seen anybody like you, before. You're like a big kitten."

"Actually," said Niko, "I'm not a kitten, I'm a nekomata."

"Wow," She talked to him like he was a toddler and patted him on the head, "I've never heard of those before."

The sparkle in her eyes disappeared. She sighed as her eyes turned dull, listless, and tired.

"What's wrong, miss?" Niko was anxious for an answer like how a mother would be anxious to hear if her baby would be okay after it had been gored through the stomach by a walrus's tusk and had been stuck on it for a half-hour.

"Oh, nothing. Maybe I'll tell you some other time."

"Well, okay, if you're sure."

"Yes..."

"Well, anyway, I was wondering if you could help."

She batted her lashes. She looked at Niko as intently as a bird watcher observes a Honduran Emerald Butterfly perched on her wrist.

"You see," Niko continued, "I'm trying to clean up this robot and I was wondering if you could lend me some WD-40."

"Oh, we don't have any of that around here," she put her finger to her lip, "However, you can make a cleaning solution out of some hydrogen sulfide and mix it in a bottle with a viscous substance like maple syrup."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but it's very caustic, it'll burn your skin right off, so be sure you wear gloves."

"Okay. But where am I going to get any maple syrup?"

"It doesn't have to be syrup. You can use any liquid so long as it's sticky." the robot girl suddenly got reminded to add in this non-sequitur, "Oh, and you might want to take this first aid kit with you, too." the robot girl brought a U-Line first aid box within his arm's reach.

"Oh, gee," Niko grabbed the box, "thanks, Miss."

"Please, call me Silver."

"Okay, Silver, thanks a bunch." Niko waltzed outside and eagerly cracked open the first aid chest, expecting an adequate supply of bandages and rubbing alcohol…

"Hey, Niko," I asked, "what's in the kit?"

"There's a bunch of surgical tools in here," said Niko, "but they're all rusty so I don't think they're good for anything."

"Oh, I can think of a few things that rusty surgical tools are good for. Four of them involve rape."

"What's rape?"

"Rape is a special kind of love that a man can give to a woman. It's how I meet a lot of girls your age."

"But I'm a boy."

"Oh really? I thought you identified as some sort of genderqueer freakshow, you little fucking pillowbiter."

Niko tried to ignore my last comment and looked down at the tools one more time.

"Hey," Niko shouted, "there's a clean syringe in here. It's factory sealed in a plastic wrapping and everything. This might be useful for collecting that slime in the shrimp swamps I think that's good enough to be the viscous substance we need for the cleaning solution."

"What? Oh, you mean that scary place where all the workers got their flesh disintegrated?" then I made a ghOooOOooOst sound, "OoooOOOooohh!"

Niko looked down and started shaking a little, "Oh, that's right… Well, if it means being able to make a cleaning solvent that will fix that robot so he can help us get closer to the Tower, then I'll have to be brave."

"That's the spirit, kiddo, you're really making me proud."

"But, um," Niko spun his fingers around each other and cast his eyes down, "I'm a little tired. Can I go to bed?"

"Aaaand, you've just gone and disappointed me, again. Goddamnit, can you go one moment without embarrassing me?"

"Sorry."

"No, no, it's alright," it wasn't, "I was going to tell you to go to bed anyway. Now that you have your gas mask: put it on and take a shortcut through the Methane fields."

"You mean the Hydrogen Sulfide fields?"

"Don't get smart with me, boy!"

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize, just get going!"

"Yes sir!" he saluted me and then ambled his way out the door.

As he was leaving Silver's outpost and running over to the geyser fields, something caught his eye. He slowed his pace stared at it with a curiosity tinged with dread.

I panned the camera over to whatever caught his curiosity…

"Oh, look, a robot suicide pact! Get over there, Niko, maybe there's something you can pick off of them."

Niko looked toward the sky for a moment, "Okay."

He took a deep breath and sprinted towards it.

"Hey, what's the rush? They're just robots."

"I'm scared they might come back to life and kill me." He stopped among the pile of derelict machine bodies and scanned his surroundings for something interesting to take.

"Oh, robots don't come back to life, Niko. You're thinking of people. Where I come from: people occasionally get infected with a virus that reanimates them into mindless, flesh-eating zombies."

"Th-th-that's not true, i-is it?"

"Oh, yeah. It's true."

"Oh, In my world, zombies are only in comics and video games."

"Well, it's a grim reality for us. That's why everybody carries garlic and vials of holy water when they go outside."

"Isn't that stuff for vampires?"

"Yes, we have vampires too. And mummies, and werewolves, and chupacabras, and skinwalkers, and Las Brujas de Monterrey."

"Las what?"

"Las Brujas de Monterrey. They're freaky creatures that look like crazy old hags but they float down from trees and lunge at people to rip them apart with their fingernails."

Niko paused a moment, imitating Tsuyu Asui's finger tic (you know, that frog girl from My Hero Academia that I have sexual fantasies about where I use a funnel to pour kerosene directly into her stomach and I throw a lit match inside to funnel so that she burns to death from the inside while her tongue is wrapped around a block of ice), to imagine what it would be like to encounter a creature like that. He shivered at the thought.

Just then, Niko perked up, "Mr. Vainglory, I've found something!"

"What?" I watched as Niko ran over to a piece of junk. He set the lightbulb down and picked up the object with both hands and held it like a Claymore mine.

"It looks like a camera of some kind."

"What kind?"

"Um… It's like an old-fashioned big thing with a lens that sticks out like a nose, and-"

" _ **WHAT BRAND!**_ _ **READ WHAT THE BRAND AND MODEL SAYS!**_ "

"AH! Nikon, it says Nikon! I-i-it's a Nikon N6006!"

" **Jesus Christ** , was that so hard! Take a picture with it, see if it works."

Niko pressed the button to snap a photo. It would have been amusing to see his retinas get fried with the camera's flash but I had no such luck.

"It's not working. The thing on it says 'err.'"

"Huh," I Was disappointed that it didn't work. I could have sold it to some idiot hipster on Ebay who insisted on using film instead of digital, "Well, that sucks."

"You know, this lens looks like it's just the right size for the missing eye on that rowbot."

"What? That thing's missing an eyeball or whatever? Why didn't you say anything about that before?"

"I- I- I don't know. I- I didn't think t-to mention it."

" _ **WELL, WHY DON'T YOU START THINKING THEN!"**_

I conjured a brick to fall from the sky and it hit Niko in the face.

" _Owie_ ," Niko's eyes welled with tears and he started bawling, " _That wasn't nice_!"

" _ **well, maybe if you did some THINKING and dodged the brick, you wouldn't have gotten your face caved in. DIDN'T FUCKING THINK ABOUT THAT, NOW DID YOU!"**_

Still crying, Niko touched his nose and look down on his fingers to see rosy-colored blood on them, making him cry even harder.

" _ **Lick it off**_ **.** " I said.

" _No-o-o, waaah!"_

" _ **You're a fucking cat, aren't you?"**_ this was one of my fetishes and I prepared some lube and a stray kitten for a session of masturbation, _ **"Lick your wounds like a good kitty."**_

Niko did as I told him and I came inside the fresh, pure kitten's asshole...

When I came back after cleaning myself up, he stopped crying, his nose wasn't bleeding anymore, but he was still licking at himself.

"Alright, Niko," I said, "that's enough. We better put you to bed."

He didn't say anything. He looked up to me with a dull, glassy stare.

"Put your gas mask on and get moving through the geyser fields," Niko looked up in my direction but he wasn't really looking at anything in particular, "MOVE!"

He put his mask on and lurched off to the geysers...

What threatened to seep into his lungs and eat away at him from the inside proved to be a trifle concern with his mask on. His sulky gait turned into a cheerful skip as he allowed his eyes to wander around and his perception of the deadly, fearful haze took on a graceful shape to him. He was enchanted by the smooth and nimble dancing of the vapor trailing off of the primordial gushing eruptions coming from the geysers. He admired how the mist would disperse into the wind like kisses that a mother would plant on her child's face that she wished would never be scrubbed off or allowed to evaporate but were destined not to stay there for very long.

He gasped. His eyes caught a glimpse of an irregularity in the topography of the field.

"Mr. Vainglory!" Niko shouted, "I found this crack with gas pouring out."

"So?" I was skimming through a copy of The Gay Science by Frederich Nietzsche. I liked the idea of being an Overman, a guy who's too awesome to be held to the moral standards of the common rabble, and I liked the idea of God being dead because, if somebody did kill him, I would do a much better job than he ever did if I were to take his place. From what I could tell, however, it was a very boring read. A gay book, indeed.

"Well, Silver told me about how to make a cleaning solution a little while ago. Since I can reach the gas coming out of the vent right here, I can just use the Jägermeister bottle..." He bent over with the empty liquor bottle and allowed it to be filled with hydrogen sulfide. A sense of victory welled inside him as he recorked the bottle, "there! That's one ingredient down."

"What the hell do we need that for?"

"We can use it to clean up the rowbot!"

"Oh yeah, that thing. Whatever. Hey, lookit, I'd really love to put up with your shit but there's this peace vigil I got to go to."

"A peace vigil? I never would have thought you liked to go to those. You're such an angry and violent person."

"No, I'm not an ' _ang_ _owee_ _and vio_ _w_ _ent p_ _oh-_ _son_ _nn_ '," I said, mocking Niko by imitating a child's inexperienced grasp on the English language, "I'm a wrathful and vengeful _GOD_! Get the terminology right," I took a moment to catch my breath, "Anyway, that's why I really need to put you to bed. There's a derailed monorail car over by the dock; it's got a bed in it. We can worry about that rowbot in the morning."

"How will I be able to tell when it's morning when I have the sun in my hands?"

" _I'LL TELL YOU WHEN IT'S MORNING, YOU LITTLE SMARTASS! GET TO BED!"_

"AH!" Niko cringed at my harsh shouting, "I'm sorry, I'm going to bed now!"

Niko raced down to the dock. I motivated him by casting thunderbolts a few steps behind him so that the adrenaline pumping through him would make him run even faster.

In hardly any time at all, Niko found the monorail car that I mentioned before and jumped into bed, scrambling to get the covers over himself. He breathed a sigh of relief to know that he was safe. But that runner did a number on his lungs and he panted like a dog with whooping cough on a hot summer day.

"Are you ready to go to sleep, Niko?" I asked in a gentle, fatherly tone.

"Yes, Mr. Vainglory." he was still winded, "I hope I have a good dream tonight."

"I'LL MAKE SURE YOU WON'T!" I conjured a big screen TV with an integrated hard drive containing torture porn movies in front of his bed, "I command you to watch a little movie marathon! You're gonna watch Cannibal Holocaust, the August Underground Trilogy, Serbian Film, and a bunch of snuff films I made where the people starring in those movies really die in that order and then you can go to sleep while they play again on an endless loop! I got shit to do tonight so I don't want you going anywhere," I then conjured some restraints to keep Niko in place, "enjoy your movies, you little piss-stain!"

While he was watching his movie marathon: I made my way to my van, loaded with an arsenal of guns, fertilizer bombs, and a week's supply of gasoline. Tonight, there was going to be a peace vigil in Flushing Meadows and a Black Lives Matter protest in Midtown. That gave me a good excuse to have a little fun in my downtime...


End file.
